Welcome to the latest Ted Hughes Society podcast. Our guest for this episode in the series Meet Our Folks is the British literary critic and academic Neil Roberts. Neil specializes in modern English literature, particularly the works of 20th-century poets and novelists in books that explore themes of nature, culture in the works of authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Peter Redgrove and, of course, Ted Hughes.

Neil attended at Latymer Upper School in London and Clare College where he was awarded his BA , MA and PhD in English, laying the foundations for a distinguished career as a scholar and critic of modernist authors and poetry. Neil has published many highly respected books including Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2015) and Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel (Clemson University Press, 2019) and, co-edited with Terry Gifford and Mark Wormald, Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) which through close readings of his poetry examines Hughes's engagement with environmental themes.

Neil has collaborated extensively with fellow scholars, most notably Terry Gifford, on critical studies of Ted Hughes, which Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (Faber & Faber 1981), which pioneered ecocritical readings of Hughes' work, and Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Cambridge University Press 2013), which Neil and Terry coedited with Mark Wormald, and which traces the development of Hughes’s poetic voice from student poet to Poet Laureate.

Neil has played a key role in advancing Ted Hughes studies, through organizing seminars, readings and most notably the Seventh International Ted Hughes Conference at the University of Sheffield, publishing articles in The Ted Hughes Society Journal, and more recently Ted Hughes Studies and Recklings. Neil has also served as a leading member of the council of the Ted Hughes Society, where he is at present Treasurer.

if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast.

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

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Welcome to the latest Ted Hughes Society podcast.

This episode is released just before the Society’s Conference, entitled The Legacy of Ted Hughes, to be held at Hughes’s former college, Pembroke College, Cambridge, and our guest, for this most recent episode in our short season of talks by prominent members of the society, is Dr. Mike Sweeting. Mike is a member of the society’s council, with a particular responsibility for constitutional matters. Like many prominent members of the society, Mike has undertaken post-graduate study on the work of Ted Hughes, in Mike’s case, focusing on Hughes’s deep interest in and knowledge of anthropology.

Ted Hughes went up to Cambridge to study English Literature, but in his final year changed to Archaeology and Anthropology - reportedly, following a visionary dream of burnt fox, which he claimed warned him that his continued formal study of English Literature was destroying the poems that were existing in some potential form in either his subconscious or some otherworld.

Like Hughes, Mike was born and raised in the rural North of England, where Mike’s father was a farmer. However, Mike decided against the farming life, entering Durham University where he progressed from his first degree to eventual doctoral studies. Since completing his PhD Mike has been involved in three areas of work, often simultaneously. He has been a scholar of the poetry of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but also a church leader and Christian Pastor, and a businessman and business consultant. He has advised owners of businesses on Mergers & Acquisitions and has also established corporate finance firms in 15 countries and has been chairman of a charity working in India, the USA, Canada, Romania and Argentina.

Mike has been a keen rock climber and target shooter since the age of 15.

if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast.

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the latest in our series Meet Our Folks, in which prominent society members talk about themselves and their particular interest in the life and work of Ted Hughes. Our guest for this episode,Terry Gifford, is a poet, climber, former chair of the Ted Hughes Society. Terry is undoubtedly one of the foremost Ted Hughes scholars, a leading critic of the work of D.H.Lawrence and a pioneer in the field of eco-criticism. His many publications include Ted Hughes, a critical study co-authored with Neil Roberts and published by Faber & Faber in 1981; Teaching Advanced Level English Literature: a student-centred approach (with John Brown, Routledge 1989); Reconnecting with John Muir (University of Georgia Press, 2006); Ted Hughes in the Routledge Guides to Literature series (2009); The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011); Ted Hughes in Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018; Pastoral in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series (2019); and Reading and D.H.Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press 2025). A selection of Terry’s varied, skilful and engaging poetry A Feast of Fools, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2018.

Until his retirement in 2004, Terry was Reader in Literature and Environment at the University of Leeds. He was the Director of Research in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and introduced practice-based Ph.D. programmes at Leeds in theatre, dance and creative writing. And for 21 years, until 2008, he was the founding director of the annual International Festival of Mountaineering Literature. Terry is at present a visiting scholar at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, and is currently Profesor Honorifico at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain, where he co-supervises Ph.D. students in ecocriticism.

In this episode, Terry reflects on his working life in education - starting as a school teacher and then acquiring the knowledge, qualification and experience to teach in universities; as a scholar, particularly of Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence; but running through Terry’s talk, like a strong thread linking his various projects and interests is collaboration and partnership.

if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast.

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.